We waited through all of Thursday for Diego Maradona. Then we hung on through Friday for word of his health. We? “We” were the fetching Cristina Chiabotto, Miss Italy 2004; Mario Cipollini, the maestro of Italian cycling for the past 10 years; a half-dozen other celebrities from Italian broadcasting, theatre and comedy; the fabulously glamorous presenter Milly Carlucci, some anxious studio barons and producers, and your reporter.

They were waiting for Maradona to come dancing; I was waiting for him to talk, for our interview, and to spend two days backstage watching his new television career develop. We were in Rome, on the premises of one of the shows that have relaunched a svelte, energetic Maradona into public life.

It was not to be as straightforward as that. By 9pm on Thursday word reached RAI, the Italian broadcasting company, that the superstar of its hit weekend programme Dancing With The Stars had not caught his usual Wednesday night flight from Buenos Aires to Rome. By the next morning it became clear that he would not even be arriving late. He would not be arriving at all.

He had been advised against the trip by his doctor, he told us. We were disappointed, of course, even a little cross, but we supposed it was good news at least that Maradona was taking medical advice. He and the medical profession have been dancing a tango of mutual suspicion for the past 25 years, from some bad drugs, notably an excess of cortisone given to him by sports professionals who should have known better, to the cocaine addiction he says he has kicked for good.

He needs to take care of himself. Two heart attacks in the past six years are not the orthodox dividend that an athlete gives his body in retirement, especially one of the most gifted sportsmen of the past 30 years.

“The most recognised man on earth,” Maradona once proudly noted of himself. And at times the most notorious, three times banned from football for testing positive for drugs. And until recently, if we’re honest, the most grotesque, a man turning gradually into the shape . . . well, the shape of a football. Then he had surgery. The pictures speak for themselves. You may need to check again if we’ ve printed the before-and-after captions in the correct order. It’s not quite Michael Jackson, but the transformation of Maradona over the past six months is almost surreal.

So is a lot of his life. Even that he has a life at all. “Nobody seems to realise it is a miracle that he’s still alive,” said his personal physician, Alfredo Cahe, 13 months ago. A year later, he qualifies almost as a resurrection: lean, lively, a little overworked, but apparently stable. How stable will be judged against the standards of his past, a full diagnosis reserved for the future. But he has a body to celebrate once again.

His shape was never the athletic prototype. It was short, squat, explosively powerful, capable of the most nimble pirouette, amazingly rugged and, it would turn out, easily given to excess fat. The very young Maradona, the scamp from the Buenos Aires badlands, looks slender in portraits.

But even by the time he was on local television doing keepy-uppies, a circus magician of ball control, he was stocky, his gifts compacted in a man short enough to be a jockey. It was always a phenomenon, the Maradona anatomy, and you could tell a lot of his life story through the parts of that 5ft 5in frame.

Diego’s stomach

Maradona has spent much of the past five years in Cuba, choosing it as the place to conquer his addiction to cocaine, he said, and to escape the cloying attentions and controversies that had pursued him for the past two decades in Argentina and Europe.

Last April, Maradona became seriously ill with cardiac and respiratory problems. Once released from hospital he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Buenos Aires, then he returned briefly to Cuba before taking a radical step to cure himself of obesity.

It had become a chronic condition. His struggle against excessive weight gain goes back at least to his early 30s. It contributed to his nadir as a footballer, expulsion from the 1994 World Cup finals after he returned a urine sample that showed traces of ephedrine, a banned substance sometimes used to control weight. He had been demonstrably unfit three months before the finals, and his physical alteration by the time the World Cup began was startling.

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